Health Care Transformation: An Academic Application System Case Study

During the 1st Semester of 2017, at the Brazilian Aeronautics Institute of Technology (Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica - ITA), a successful Interdisciplinary Problem-Based Learning (IPBL) experience took place. At that time, almost 30 undergraduate and graduate students from 3 different courses within just 17 academic weeks had the opportunity of conceptualizing, modeling, and developing a Computer System based on Big Data, Internet of Things (IoT), and other emerging technologies for government and private organizations. The purpose of this system was to aggregate data from actors such as Patients, Physicians, Hospitals, and Health Care Suppliers, by integrating them into just one decision making process. This academic research project was named in Portuguese as "Soluções Tecnológicas Aplicáveis às Mídias e Produtos em Saúde - STAMPS", meaning in English "Technological Solutions Applicable for Health Care - TSA4HC". It was planned to allow students to develop health care decision making systems to address crisis management scenarios such as epidemics. Differently from other existing systems from Universities, Research Centers, Governmental Agencies, Public and/or Private, this system was developed and tested in just 17 academic calendar weeks, applying the Scrum agile method and its best practices. This experience was stored in a Google site and implemented as a Proof of Concept (PoC). It represents one example of how to address the old problem of teaching, learning, designing, and implementing complex intelligent systems to solve health care system problems, by collaboratively using the Scrum agile method with Python or Java, Spark, NoSQL databases, Kafka, and other available technologies.